14 THE MEANING OF EVOLUTION 



there was not in man the power to conceive his own 

 origin. 



If we ever wonder why it took so long before the 

 thought of evolution should have fully dawned upon 

 the world, the answer is not far to seek. No student 

 of Natural History in ancient or medieval times had 

 the faintest conception of the enormous number of 

 animals and of plants in the world. The old Greek 

 or Roman student of Natural History gives no evi- 

 dence of knowing more than a few hundred ani- 

 mals. Men have named to-day, with systematic Latin 

 names, hundreds of animals for every one that Pliny 

 ever knew, and he knew more than any other man 

 of early times of whom record has come to us. 



In early days men who traveled into foreign coun- 

 tries brought back accounts of what they saw. The 

 whole Natural History of ancient times was filled 

 with the most absurd and ludicrous stories of all sorts 

 of things to be seen in distant lands. Sir John Man- 

 deville tells tales almost as imaginative and quite as 

 amusing as those attributed to Baron Munchausen. 



Upon the great awakening of the fifteenth century, 

 with its new study and its wide-ranging travel, an 

 entire change came over the human mind. Men who 

 journeyed into far countries brought back with them 

 not only accounts of what they saw, but, so far as 

 might be, the things themselves. Collections of plants 



